Party Competition and Policy Outcomes in Multilevel Systems

Research question/goal:

The aim of this project is to analyse the determinants and implications of party competition in the regional sphere in European multilevel systems. In doing so, the project addresses three main research questions. First, do parties on the sub-national level respond to the structural characteristics and ideological orientations of the regional electorate when formulating their election manifestos? In a second step, the project will deal with the question of what impact European regional policy and funding, the different types of regional authority, the patterns of national party competition and the programmatic profiles of sub-national parties have on the outcome of the coalition formation and portfolio allocation processes at the regional level. Third, the project seeks to analyse the impact of regional governments and their partisan composition on policy outputs. To answer these questions, the project builds on theories relating to party competition and government formation in multilevel systems and the principal-agent approach. To test our hypotheses, we use a data set that covers information on issue saliencies and policy positions of political parties at the regional and the national level in nine European states.

Current stage:

In collaboration with its partners from the COHESIFY project consortium, the project team has expanded the data collection by including further programmatic documents from recent sub-national elections in the European countries under study, i.e. Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The collected documents of political parties were uploaded to the online archive www.polidoc.net, which is updated continually with the support of the MZES Data & Methods Unit. On the basis of the collected party manifesto data, interviews with regional stakeholders, and original survey data on the perception of EU cohesion policy by the citizens of Baden-Württemberg and Thuringia, we published two case studies and are currently preparing papers on the impact of European regional policy on the support for European integration among citizens in Baden-Württemberg and Thuringia.

Fact sheet

Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom

Publications

Journal Articles

Bräuninger, Thomas, Marc Debus, Jochen Müller and Christian Stecker (2019): Party Competition and Government Formation in Germany: Business as Usual or New Patterns?. German Politics, 28, issue 1, pp. 80-100.more

Debus, Marc, and Jochen Müller (2013): The programmatic development of CDU and CSU since reunification: Incentives and constraints for changing policy positions in the German multi-level system. German Politics, 22, issue 1-2, pp. 151-171.more

Debus, Marc, and Martin Gross (2017): Positions on and issue emphasis of European integration and EU Cohesion policy: Analysing (sub-)national party manifestos. [COHESIFY research paper; 4]more

Conference Presentations

Bräuninger, Thomas, Marc Debus, Jochen Müller and Christian Stecker (2018): Business as usual? Party competition and government formation in Germany following the refugee crisis. [Jahrestagung des DVPW Arbeitskreises Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie, Oldenburg, May 31st to June 01st, 2018]more

Bräuninger, Thomas, Marc Debus, Jochen Müller and Christian Stecker (2018): Party Competition and Government Formation in Germany: Business as Usual or New Patterns?. [27. Wissenschaftlicher Kongress der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main, September 25th to September 28th, 2018]more

Debus, Marc (2018): Pariah parties, policy profiles and party politics in a multi-level system: coalition formation in Germany 2017/2018. [Conference "2017: Europe’s Bumper Year of Elections", European University Institute, Florence, March 08th to March 09th, 2018]more

Gross, Martin (2017): Does anyone care? Explaining the variation in sub-national parties’ emphasis of European issues and EU Cohesion policy. [1st Regional Research and Networking Conference, Heidelberg, January 27th, 2017]more

Gross, Martin, and Marc Debus (2016): EU regional policy and the support for European integration among political parties. [MZES-Workshop "Vices and Virtues of Decentralization: Challenges in European multi-level Democracies", MZES, Mannheim, November 25th to November 26th, 2016]more

Gross, Martin (2016): Spending other people's money? Sub-national party positions on European integration and EU cohesion policy. [ECPR General Conference, Charles University Prague, September 07th to September 10th, 2016]more

Debus, Marc, Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Hartmut Wessler (2014): On the Use of Different Modalities in Political Communication: Evidence from German Election Manifestos. [First Bremen Conference on Multimodality "Bridging the Gap between Here and There: Combining Multimodal Analysis from International Perspectives", University of Bremen, September 10th to September 13th, 2014]more

Klingelhöfer, Tristan, Jochen Müller and Marc Debus (2014): Scrutinizing the Assumption of Consistency Benefits in Research on Multi-Level Party Politics.. [21st International Conference of Europeanists, Washington D.C., March 14th to March 16th, 2014]more

Obert, Peter, and Jochen Müller (2013): The thresholds of representation and relevance and their implications for the survival of new parties in the context of Czech regional elections. [ECPR General Conference, Sciences Po, Bordeaux, September 04th to September 07th, 2013]more